A Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated. — © Edsger Dijkstra
Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
Teamwork remains a sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped because it is hard to measure (teamwork impacts the outcome of an organization in such comprehensive and invasive ways that it's virtually impossible to isolate it as a single variable) and because it is extremely hard to achieve (it requires levels of courage and discipline that few executives possess) - ironically, building a strong team is very simple (it doesn't require masterful insights or tactics).
Throughout this book, we've been evangelizing simplicity, but ironically, the practice of simplicity is not simple. It is easy to build a bulky design by adding layer upon layer of navigation and features; it's much more difficult to create simple, graceful designs. Paring designs to essential elements while maintaining elegance and functionality requires courage and discipline.
I've always relied on discipline to achieve goals great and small. At a young age, my father instilled a real work ethic in me - and a fear of men. I always felt like if I didn't have a natural knack for something, I could kind of out-discipline the competition as it were. So I would always work as hard as I possibly could, sometimes to my own detriment and my personal life. For me, I think will power and discipline are very synonymous.
Elegance must be the right combination of distinction, naturalness, care and simplicity. Outside this, believe me, there is no elegance. Only pretension.
In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times it will require political education and legal fights, at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw all abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping some abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing no abortions.
The thing about discipline is that people misunderstand the word discipline. People think discipline in the dog world is punishment. Discipline is how you achieve what you want to achieve in life. You have to be very focused, very disciplined, very consistent, very diligent. All of those things.
I work very hard to achieve simplicity, which is never natural, never spontaneous. It's always obtained at the price of a great effort.
As a mother, I work hard every day and I expect that work to be recognized and appreciated. Because I work for and with human beings, sometimes they're grateful and sometimes they aren't.
There are really only two ways to teach. You can inspire the student to voluntarily and enthusiastically choose to do the hard work necessary to get a great education, or you can attempt to require it of him.
Everyone has the same amount of time, and hard work is simply hard work. As a result, what you do in the time you work determines what you achieve. And since what you do is determined by what you think, how big you think becomes the launching pad for how high you achieve.
I like the fact that the audience does notice the hard work that I put in to maintain my physique, and there is nothing better than having your hard work appreciated!
I have always said, '40 is the new 20,' and I truly believe that, but it for sure takes a lot of hard work, education, and discipline to keep it all together as we make our way to 50 and beyond.
Acknowledge the elegance of simplicity.
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